The right acquisition does not find you.
You find it.
Most buyers come to us after the same experience: months of deal flow that went nowhere, a term sheet that fell apart in diligence, or capital deployed into something that made sense on paper and did not in practice.
The problem was never the market.
The problem was the process.
Four ways to work with us.
Some clients come before they have found a deal. Some come mid-process when something does not feel right. Some come after close, needing someone who understands the business they just bought to help them run it.
For buyers who need a full acquisition capability without building one in-house.
You have a thesis, capital, and a calendar that is already full. What you do not have is the infrastructure to run a disciplined acquisition process from search to close without momentum overriding judgment at every turn.
We provide that. End to end. Mandate formation, proprietary sourcing, founder outreach, diligence, structuring, negotiation, and closing. You stay focused on running your business. We find you the right one to buy next.
For operators running a business whose financial infrastructure has not kept up.
After most acquisitions, the buyer inherits a P and L formatted for a sale process, not for running a company. The cost structure is unmapped. There is no model that tells you what is driving margin, what is exposed, or where to put the next pound of capital.
We start at the foundation. Clean up the books, rebuild accounts from source data, and make sure what you are looking at every month actually reflects what the business is doing. Then we build on top of it: forecasting, scenario modelling, and a strategy layer that connects your numbers to where you are trying to go.
A seller's numbers are formatted for a sale.
We trace every one back to source: transactions, processor statements, cost structure. You see what you are actually buying before you pay for it.
What you get is not a report that tells you what you already know. It is an independently verified picture of the target's financial position. Every gap, inconsistency, and hidden exposure surfaced before you sign, while it is still your negotiating leverage.
For buyers whose name means nothing to a seller yet.
Sellers check who is calling before they take the call. A buyer with no website, no clear thesis and no LinkedIn presence loses the conversation before it starts.
We build your website, your acquisition messaging and your LinkedIn presence, so the founder who looks you up recognises a serious buyer.
Buy-side M&A advisory firms in India: what to look for, and what Kautilya does
A buy-side advisor works for the acquirer, not the seller. If you are comparing buy-side advisory firms in India, the useful test is not a ranking but evidence: which deals the firm has closed for buyers, how it finds targets, and whether it will tell you to walk away. This section sets out how Kautilya answers each of those, so you can hold any firm, including us, to the same standard.
What Kautilya does for buyers
Kautilya builds proprietary, off-market acquisition pipelines and runs the mandate from definition to close: mandate formation, universe construction, founder outreach, deal screening, forensic diligence across 8 workstreams, deal structuring, negotiation support and closing assistance. It is sector-agnostic. To date it has closed 8 deals for buyers, diligenced $53.2M of businesses, contacted 10,000+ founders and achieved a 14.8% outreach response rate.
Who it suits
- Private equity funds, search funds, family offices and holding companies with a defined acquisition thesis.
- First-time acquirers. A significant portion of clients have no prior M&A experience.
- Buyers who already found a deal and only need independent diligence, offered as a standalone engagement.
Closed and diligenced deals on our portfolio range from $8K to roughly $500K, and diligence engagements go up to a ~$21M business. If your mandate sits well outside that, say so on the scoping call.
How a buy-side mandate runs
- Mandate definition. A written thesis: sector, geography, size, structure preferences and exclusions.
- Universe construction. A proprietary list of typically 500 to 2,500 companies, built from first principles rather than broker databases.
- Targeted outreach. Personalised founder outreach by email, LinkedIn and Loom video.
- Diligence and structuring. Eight-workstream forensic diligence plus creative structures such as seller financing and earnouts.
- Execution and close. Negotiation, operator placement and a 30-60-90 day post-close plan. Typical timeline from engaging a target to close is 30 to 90 days.
Questions to ask any buy-side advisory firm
- Which three recent comparable buy-side deals have you closed? Ours are public: Dino Games ($39K, ~8 weeks), Runify ($110K, ~45 days, $20K upfront) and SmartPrompt ($12K, 12 weeks) on the portfolio page.
- How do you source targets? Direct founder outreach to a proprietary universe, supplemented by monitoring of 30+ vetted marketplaces, rather than recirculating broker listings.
- How do you coordinate diligence? One team lead runs eight defined workstreams (financial, commercial, email and CRM, partnerships, traffic, tech and data, operations, strategy and exit) and delivers a report, normalised financial model and risk map.
- How are your fees structured? A monthly retainer plus a success fee that is due only if a deal closes, quoted after a scoping call, month-to-month with no lock-in.
- When have you renegotiated or abandoned a deal? 2 of 8+ LOIs were killed to protect the buyer; on SmartPrompt, 2 of 3 deals were killed before the right one closed; on Runify the portfolio records a 33% MRR correction.
Frequently asked questions
What does a buy-side M&A advisory firm in India do?
A buy-side advisor works for the acquirer, not the seller. Kautilya defines the acquisition mandate, builds a proprietary target universe, runs founder outreach, screens deals, coordinates forensic due diligence across 8 workstreams, helps structure and negotiate the offer, and supports closing and the handover afterwards.
Who is Kautilya's buy-side advisory suited to?
Private equity funds, search funds, family offices, holding companies and first-time acquirers. No prior M&A experience is required; what matters is clarity about the kind of business the buyer wants to own. Kautilya is sector-agnostic and works off-market.
How does a buy-side mandate with Kautilya run?
In five phases: mandate definition, universe construction (typically 500 to 2,500 companies per mandate), targeted founder outreach, diligence and structuring, and execution and close. The typical timeline from engaging with a specific target to close is 30 to 90 days.
How is Kautilya's buy-side advisory priced?
A monthly retainer plus a success fee on close, quoted after a scoping call. The success fee is only due if a transaction closes. Retainers are month-to-month with no long-term lock-in, and standalone due diligence and market research are quoted per project.
What should I ask a buy-side advisory firm before hiring them?
Ask for three recent comparable buy-side deals, how they source targets beyond broker lists, how they coordinate diligence, how their fees are structured and when they are earned, and for examples of deals they renegotiated or told the client to abandon.
Does Kautilya ever advise a buyer to walk away?
Yes. On the site's published record, 2 of 8+ LOIs were killed to protect the buyer, and on the SmartPrompt mandate 2 of 3 deals were killed before the right one closed. Diligence is run owner-minded, and Kautilya recommends killing a deal when the numbers do not work.
How do I hire a buy-side advisor at Kautilya?
Submit your acquisition criteria or book a scoping call on the Engage page at kautilya-pe.com/engage.
Ready to talk? Hire a buy-side advisor: start your acquisition mandate. Background reading: what buy-side M&A advisory is.
Mandate Definition
Most acquisitions fail before the first conversation is ever made. Not in diligence. Not at the negotiation table. They fail the moment a buyer starts searching without knowing precisely what they are looking for.
You have seen it. Months of deal flow that goes nowhere. Opportunities that feel right until they do not. Capital sitting idle while you evaluate things that were never going to fit. That is not a sourcing problem, it is a mandate problem.
We fix it first. The buyers who move fastest and waste least are the ones who started with the clearest brief, not a vague sector preference and not a rough budget range.
For a UK immigration platform, generating 2 to 3M ARR and heading into a Series A, the mandate was not to find a business to acquire. It was to identify 50K to 250K in annualised cashflow through structures the market had not seen before.
The mandate we build with you becomes the lens everything else gets evaluated through. It is the reason we can move quickly when the right deal appears, and walk away cleanly when it does not.
For SmartPrompt, we explored four categories before submitting a single LOI. That process produced a filter precise enough to disqualify two serious candidates mid-engagement.
Universe Construction
The best deals are not listed anywhere. The operators who built them are not looking to sell, until the right conversation finds them.
The opportunities on open marketplaces have already been seen by everyone. The information asymmetry is gone before you arrive.
The deals worth doing are the ones nobody else has found yet. Every universe we build starts from zero: primary research, proprietary data, and channels that require effort to access.
For a UK immigration advisory client, we built a target universe that had never existed before, mapping a market that had never been systematically approached for M and A.
For Dino Games, scraping infrastructure pulled App Store and Google Play data across thousands of titles before contacting a single founder. The asset that closed was not on any marketplace.
The universe we build is not a starting point we hand off. It is a living research asset, continuously refined as feedback comes in and as conversations surface new operators.
Targeted Outreach
There is a reason most outreach does not work. It is built for volume, not trust. Trust is the only currency that opens doors in markets like these.
The first thing most sourcing operations do is launch a campaign. Thousands of emails, templated messaging, broad targeting. We tested that and moved channels quickly once data showed weak conversion.
Response rates shifted from below 5 percent to 20-40 percent by moving toward social and context-rich outreach. Not a template. A real opening to a real conversation.
Personalization was treated as a first-order variable, not an optimization layer. Each message was a real opening to a real conversation.
For this engagement, we ran channels in parallel and measured conversion in real time.
| Channel | Volume | Ranking |
|---|---|---|
| Cold calls | ~200-250 | #1 |
| Direct email | ~1,500 | #2 |
| included | #3 | |
| Social (FB/WA) | ~600 | #4 |
Cold calls ranked first. The data set resource allocation. Result: 43+ serious conversations and 8 to 10 aligned operators.
Diligence and Structuring
You are about to spend six figures on a business you have never operated. The seller is friendly and the numbers look clean. The version you are shown is rarely complete.
Most sellers do not have a full picture of their own financials either. Historical accounting choices, drifted data logic, and legacy payment routing do not show up on summary sheets. They become your problem at close.
This is not worst-case. This is a normal deal. The only way to find what is actually there is source-level reconstruction.
7 material findings. 30,134 transactions validated. 99.83 percent monetary match rate. Surfaced within 15 calendar days, before capital changed hands.
The diligence work was so operationally grounded that the buyer asked us to keep running the business as fractional CFOs.
On other deals, findings looked different but the principle was the same. Verification before commitment.
- Dino Games: discrepancies found across payment platforms, plus legacy monetization mechanics requiring shutdown before close.
- Runify: quoted MRR did not match collected cash after currency and collection timing adjustments.
- SmartPrompt: two LOIs terminated before closing the right asset. Price looked attractive; probability-weighted downside did not.
Execution and Close
Getting to LOI is not the hard part. Holding discipline from LOI to close while pressure builds is where most deals fail quietly.
We have closed across five asset classes. Execution was not paperwork, it was discipline: holding structure, refusing unsafe mechanics, and ensuring operational readiness on day one.
The client entered its Series A with a live growth lever worth 70K to 80K annually and a repeatable framework to keep deploying.
For our UK immigration client: 1,500+ operators mapped and 43+ serious conversations converted to a referral partnership worth 70K-80K / yrand an enterprise-value impact up to 1.6M.
For Inspire3: 15 days, seven findings resolved, and a verified financial model from independently validated source data. The engagement became an ongoing operating role as fractional CFO.
We do not close deals for the sake of closing deals. We close the right ones, and we have walked away from enough wrong ones to know the difference.